The destructiveness of the Great War was almost beyond the imagination of contemporary Europeans. Among its most notable and horrific features was the long period of trench warfare, in which lines of entrenched men, often not far apart, periodically went “over the top,” only to gain a few yards of bloody ground before being thrown back with enormous causalities. Visual Source 20.4 shows a particular instance of this process by the British painter John Nash (1893–1977), who was an official war artist.

Nash was also part of an eighty-man British unit that was sent over the top in late 1917 and one of only twelve survivors of that attack. Three months later he painted this haunting picture from his memory of that experience.